Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume VI.djvu/597

 ENALIOSAURIANS ise is not well ascertained ; according to Wag- jer, the bones of the wrist are wanting in this bird. The natives of New South Wales call the emu parembang. It is timid, runs with great rapidity, and is very rarely taken ; it was once common in the neighborhood of Sydney, but civilization has driven it beyond the Blue mountains. It prefers open shrubby places and sandy plains. When pursued it takes readi- ly to the water, and swirns with its body most- ly submerged. It feeds on fruits, berries, roots, and various herbs. The female lays six or seven eggs, in a slight hollow scratched in the earth ; the male hatches the eggs, and takes care of the brood until they can provide for themselves ; the young are grayish with four bands of bright red. The flesh is eaten by the natives, and is said to have the taste of beef. ENALIOSAURIANS (Gr. hdfaos, marine, and cravpof, a lizard), an order of fossil marine rep- tiles, found in the liassic, triassic, and creta- ceous epochs. They unite characters which appear at first sight incompatible, having the vertebras of fishes, the teeth of crocodilians, the body of lizards, the paddles of cetaceans or marine turtles, and some have a long snake-like neck. Many of these aquatic saurians attained a large size, and from their voracity must have been the terror of the waters of the secon- dary epoch, after the disappearance of the great sauroid fishes of the carboniferous period. Pictet considers them as coming nearest to the saurians, though so different from any existing types as to require the establishment of a new order, whose principal characters are bicon- cave vertebras, wider than long, with laminse feebly united to the bodies ; conical teeth, with- out cavity at their base, implanted in short deep-seated alveoli; and four short, flattened limbs, whose fingers are formed by discoidal bones disposed like those of cetaceans. They have been divided into two groups, whose characters correspond also to their geological position. The ichthyosaurians (including the ichthyosaurus and plesiosaurus} have well de- veloped crania, with small fosses and cavities ; these have been found in the Jurassic and creta- ceous strata. The other group, the simosaurians (including nothosaurus, simosaurus, &c.), have the cranium with very large temporal fossa3 and orbital and nasal cavities ; they are found only in the triassic strata. The first two gen- era are the best known, and the most common in the strata of England and Germany; the ichthyosaurus must have attained a length of 25 ft., and the plesiosaurus of more than 12, and both presented forms most unlike those of any existing animals, though admirably adapt- ed to the circumstances in which they lived. (See ICHTHYOSAURUS, and PLESIOSAUKUS.) ENAMELLING, the art of applying a coating of vitreous substance called enamel to a sur- face of glass or of metal, and causing it to ad- here by fusion. In its homeliest application it is a sort of glazing, and as applied by modern methods to ornament and protect surfaces of ENAMELLING 589 cast or wrought iron, it may be considered simply a process of japanning. The facility with which colors might be introduced in vitreous compounds or applied to them, and become fixed by a subsequent fusion or baking, made the art in early times exceedingly popu- lar, and in the middle ages it attained a higher rank even than it now holds, as one of the fine arts. The ancient Persians and Arabians ap- pear to have practised it upon earthenware and porcelain ; and the mode of coloring this ware at the present day is properly a process of enamelling. Articles of pottery enamelled in colors are found among the ruins of ancient Thebes, and in many of the cities of Egypt are buildings constructed of enamelled bricks taken from the ruins of older cities. Wilkinson says : "It has been questioned if the Egyptians un- derstood the art of enamelling upon gold or silver, but we might infer it from an expres- sion of Pliny, who says, ' The Egyptians paint their silver vases, representing Anubis upon them, the silver being painted and not en- graved;' and M. Dubois had in his possession a specimen of Egyptian enamel." From the Egyptians the art is supposed to have passed to the Greeks, and afterward to the Romans. Brongniart, however, in his Traite des arts ce- ramiques, traces its introduction into Italy from the Balearic isles by the Spaniards, who de- rived the art from the Arabs. The Romans in- troduced it into Great Britain, as appears from various enamelled trinkets that have been dug up there with other vestiges of the Roman con- querors. That the Saxons practised the art ap- pears from an enamelled jewel found in Som- ersetshire, and preserved at Oxford, which ac- cording to its inscription was made by direc- tion of the great Alfred. The gold cup given by King John to the corporation of Lynn in Norfolk shows, by the colored enamelled dresses of the figures with which it is embellished, that the Normans also practised the art. Among the Gauls enamelling upon metallic surfaces is understood to have been in use in the 3d cen- tury. As practised upon earthenware in the style called by the French faience commune ou emaillee, and by the Italians majolica ware, it was carried to great perfection in the 16th cen- tury at Castel Durante and at Florence by the brothers Fontana d'Urbino. Other Italian cities adopted the art, and Faenza became fa- mous for the works of Guido Selvaggio. The high style of art attained hardly outlived the artists who perfected it, and from 1560 it gradually deteriorated. Bernard Palissy, by practice of 25 years directed to the production of a cup like one of great beauty shown to him, sought to introduce the art in France, and his works became very famous, but his method died with him. His productions were interesting from being true copies of natural objects, in relief, and colored with exact faith- fulness. Of late years the art has been revived in France, chiefly through the skill of Bron- gniart ; and in Berlin also beautiful work of the